Environmental sustainability

Abstract

A natural environment is comprised of physical, chemical and biological components, and interaction among them. The term "sustainability" implies meeting the present demands while maintaining environment’s capacity to meet future demands. The strategy is to balance the competing demands through strengthening of resilience and inter-connectedness or the nexus among its components. Thus, resilience of the environments in agroecosystems can be enhanced by managing the tradeoffs or disservices by restoring soil health and increasing soil organic carbon concentration. The objective is to adopt practices of sustainable intensification of "producing more from less," increasing use efficiency, and decreasing losses. Processes, cause and factors affecting the environmental sustainability need to be identified under site-specific conditions and appropriately addressed by translating science into action through governance and policy intervention. Landuse and management are important determinants of the processes, causes and factors. While addressing the science and practices are essential to achieving the environmental sustainability, the significance of promoting the environmental stewardship cannot be over-emphasized especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.